Author: Jared Clark

Illustrating a movie

While I liked Waltz with Bashir, the movie was better. Perhaps this comes from the fact that I watched the movie before approaching the graphic novel, or watched the movie a second time as part of a film class (Terrorism, Conflict, and Resistance), which helped me gain a better understanding of the circumstances surrounding the massacres at Shabra and Shatila. Either way, I felt the graphic novel was just an attempt to re-create– word-for-word, scene-for-scene–the movie. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I appreciated the muted tones and harrowing message of the graphic novel. It just couldn’t quite succeed in creating a haunted feel the way the movie does. There are two specific reasons why I feel the movie does more to Folman’s story than the graphic novel: music, and disjointed, moving images. One of Folman’s only memories of the war places him in the ocean as flares light up the sky over the Shabra and Shatila camps in Lebanon (11–13). He walks away from the sea and sees crowds of people swarming past him. In the graphic novel, these are powerful images, but contrast them with these:

Something about the way the camera shifts around him as the slow, sublime music plays in the background makes the scene even more haunting. The camera shifts and stuttering crowds create an effect that just can’t be gained with pictures alone. Perhaps more moment-to-moment shifts in the graphic novel would have better conveyed what exactly is happening and the tragedy it signifies, but reading the graphic novel, I just never felt tragedy the way the movie does. It just all goes by too quickly.

At other times in the movie, Folman glorifies war in stark contrast to the overall message of both the graphic novel and movie. For example, the scene that takes place on the beach with people surfing, smoking and drinking (before most of the men have seen real combat or witnessed a massacre) (46–47), does little justice to the movie’s Apocalypse-Now-like scene with a punk song playing over glorified war images:

Scenes like this don’t exist in the graphic novel at all. We are merely provided the memories of people who were there and the tale of a person trying to understand his part in the conflict. In a story about a massacre told by the son of people who were in Auschwitz during one of the biggest massacres in history, these scenes help provide an important, satirical viewpoint of war, unintended casualties and the real price paid, especially later, when the Phalangists knowingly and purposefully kill thousands of Palestinian refugees for revenge. I felt that the lack of glorified war scenes (or the inability to pull them off in a novel form) took away an important juxtaposition in the film and because there’s no music (you have to admit, that song is catchy), the graphic novel loses a big emotional element.

Since the pictures and dialogue in the graphic novel follow the film almost exactly, I feel like I’m left with a lesser text. I’ve often heard some people say “why read a book when you can watch the movie?” Of course, as English majors, we all know the books are better in 99.9% of cases. But what happens when the book comes after the award-winning movie? Well, why read the book, when you can watch the movie?

I’ll leave you with two additional clips from the movie (the waltz and the rocket scene) that the graphic novel tries to recreate, and comes close, but just quite can’t capture the effect I felt when I watched the pictures move to a stunning score juxtaposed with interviews in a way that makes for a more complete text in my opinion.

Look at the struggle for the gun. Listen to the music. It’s an amazing scene that the graphic novel just can’t recreate. And it also does a great job of overlaying interviews with the historical “footage” that is important to Folman’s story as someone trying to piece together the massacre he was a part of, but can’t remember.

Jump to about 2:45 and watch the way the rocket tracks slowly through the woods before they kill a kid. It’s amazing filmmaking.

Maybe I’m just being grumpy because I expected more from the graphic novel. I enjoyed reading it, but it felt like a lesser experience. For anyone who liked the graphic novel, I recommend checking out the movie, which you should be able to watch on YouTube.

Drawing Philosophy

I was going to write this post about Asterios Polyp’s confused approach when it comes to philosophy. He sometimes subscribes to a structuralist/deconstructionist approach (dualisms prevade, to understand one thing “in a better light, understand the opposite”). Other times he admits things are more complicated, and goes with the sliding scale of situations and ideas that tend to dominate postmodern philosophy. While trying to figure out where Asterios discusses these things (a difficult task given the lack of page numbers, which make notes general guidelines), I noticed something pretty cool–Mazzucchelli (who I will refer to as “Maz” from here on out) puts a lot of work into drawing philisophical ideas.

I came onto this as I was trying to find specific pages and noticed it was easier to look for the image tied to the idea that passages themselves. For example, in one example our dead narrator writes “This desire to view the world through a filter–to superimpose a rational system on to its seeming randomness–is revealed in his own favorite ideation.” The images then take up most of the page. First an image of Asterios then one of him split into a mirrored two with internal and external on one side and factual and fictional on the other. This is followed two pages later by a similar image of him talking to a woman friend. The image is split in two as he discusses male vs female, positive and negative currents, right and left hemispheres of the brain. On the next page Asterios admits “…/that things/ aren’t so black and white-/-that in actuality/ possibilities exist/ along a continuum/ between the extremes.”   These images also highlight the idea of the philosophy. He begins lightly shaded and ends up darkly shaded, along a continuum, as he says each part of this sentence. Later when he dreams of it being more like a sphere, an image of a sphere appears.

In another instance Usrsala Major describes astrology, and some of the evidence she has to support it, and as John pointed out on the twitter, we have to turn the page, like reading the stars or a star chart.

Over and over, Maz uses images to actually illustrate philosophy. I know in some of the other books we could tie actions to the pictures that represent them, but this seems like something new. Maz’s constant attention to detail here helps bring us into the pages of the text by illustrating the complicated ideas people discuss. I’m no architecture student, but I’ve also noticed he tends to illustrate a lot of the architecture concepts, and I’m willing to bet the experience would be similar for someone better versed in architecture theory than critical and cultural studies theory.

Did anyone else notice places where the drawing of complex ideas takes place? Thoughts?

Desensitization in Fun Home

Why is it that for a 21st century memoir to succeed, people have to have parental issues. Specifically, it seems all the “classic” memoris written by folks like Sedaris, Eggers, and Burroughs all come from crazy homes and suffer from some serious daddy issues. It’s like they don’t realize that 90 percent of the U.S. population has some kind of daddy issue or another.

Other people this semester have talked about how they’ve had a hard time relating to one or another character, and this week I think I’ve found mine. It’s not that I didn’t like Fun Home, I felt as a narrative it did a lot with artistic attention to detail, storytelling, and and weaving in other stories (as we see strong parallels between this and Ulysses, especially in the end). But the characters seemed largely flat and inaccessible. In fact I felt that Alison and her father, the foci of this text, were completely desensitized to emotions and showed very little development or progress throughout the text. Even when they share their experiences of homosexuality (or more importantly, her father shares his, and she just listens), little seems to develop and by the end I feel I’m left with the same awkward, uncertain, book-nerd girl we started with, and the same unreachable, distant, secret-keeping father.

One diary entry in particular seemed to epitomize the desensitization to emotion in Fun Home. In one diary entry, Alison writes: “We watched cartoons. Dad showed us the dead people. They were cut up and stuff. mother took John to a party. we didn’t go to church. John + I looked at the Sears catalog. Dad had the funeral today. Mother went to the funeral home. :-)” (148). A smiley face. She ends an entry about seeing dead people, including a kid her own age, with a smiley face. The same way Alison is detached from, and desensitized to death by a family that runs a funeral home, her emotionless family, and emotionless narrator, desensitize us to anything that resembles emotion. Even in the wake of her father’s death, she only cries for two minutes (46).

It should be noted that Bechdel, herself, does point out her inability to grieve. She writes about how after her father’s death, she would tell of it matter-of-factly, “eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me” (45).

In another way, as Lars mentioned on twitter, the whole story is told with allusions to other works of literature, almost as a way for Bechdel to distance herself from the actual tumultuous events in her life, and understand them through literature. While this approach has some merits, I felt that every parallel between her life and another person’s written one (fictional or factual) was a way for her to distance herself even further from emotions. And this made it hard for me to really feel connected or engaged by Fun Home. The characters remain too static, and avoid any serious self-reflection at all costs. When Bechdel self reflects, I feel she’s trying to make sense of a history recorded as a 10 to 14 year old in light of her adult self. This type of if-I-knew-then-what-I-know-now thinking is cliche for a reason, since we can dwell on the past all we please, but remain powerless to change anything but the present. In Fun Home Bechdel seems more interested in an unchangeable past than taking a look at the present person she’s become. This and the lack of emotion make it hard for me to connect to any of the characters in any kind of meaningful way. Not like Jake, or Brett, or Darl, or Daedalus, or Leopold, the modern fictional characters she writes about and relates to, but whom couldn’t be more different in their presentation as characters. Maybe in the end, this is Bechdel’s point: these modern characters still lived in an age of change. Perhaps now, as in 2006 when the text was published, characters are meant to reflect their modern equivalents, people who change even less than their modern lit counterparts (many of the above change very little, but still develop and show emotions as the texts progress), and remain the same uncertain, book-nerdy, timid girls and secret-keeping men throughout their lives. I’d just like to think that’s not the case.

An introduction or a warning?

Well done earlier posters on getting to some of the big issues early. As a result, I’m going to focus on one aspect of Jimmy Corrigan I found fascinating (but probably wouldn’t have blogged on as a first choice): the introduction.

Perhaps it’s better referred to as a primer than an introduction. Or an introduction to reading comics. Either way, Ware’s playfulness in this section actually helps reveal a lot about the text as a whole. His intricate and elegant language (especially in the third section, as Lars mentioned on twitter) help set a tone oft-repeated (and drawn) throughout the book. And just as importantly, his primer to comics, including the “how to read these/do you see a mouse or just lines in the box” section and the short quiz, help reveal his expectations of his readers, and some preconceptions that permeate the comic world.

On a side note, another reason I’m compelled to work with the introduction this week: no page numbers.

Jared’s directions to find the text he’s referencing in this week’s post:

1. Open front cover. 2. Stop.

If you’re like me, maybe you skipped over what looked to be a silly part of the book and just dove right into the text. If you’re like me, you may have found yourself gloriously lost by about page 30 and decided that perhaps returning to the introduction might help sort things out. In my experience, the introduction was not nearly as helpful as the first and only recap when it came to making sense of the multiple threads in JC, but the introduction was still an interesting and informative read that bears heavily on the remainder of the text.

Ware starts by outlining a brief history of visual storytelling, much like we did our first week in class. One thing I think this does is open the table for the possibilities that come with telling stories with pictures. Cavemen did it one way, paintings of the Renaissance another, and “comic books” still another. Looking back on this now, it’s almost as if Ware is spelling out a warning: this will not be like any other “comic book” you have read. And Jimmy Corrigan isn’t like any other comic book I’ve read. Panels only sometimes have a clearly defined direction, thanks to the arrows, and as others have mentioned, dreams, past stories and the present story form an interwoven story that can get really confusing. Like Ulysses confusing.

Moving on to section 2, Ease of Use, we begin to see even more of the funny tone Ware brings. Here the ease of use has nothing to do with reading (which he handles in general instructions), but the ease of portability, and convenience to transport and read the book as you please. But this does not mean this will be an easy book to read, just an easy book to carry around and read as you wait. When it comes to the actual reading experience, it’s best to read the first line of the introduction:

“While it was not the intention of the author of this publication to produce a work which would in any way be considered “difficult,” “obscure,” or, even worse, “impenetrable,” it has come to the attention of our research faculty that some readers, owing to an (entirely excusable) unfamiliarity with certain trends and fads which flow through the tributaries of today’s ” cutting-edge culture,” might not be suitably equipped to sustain a successful linguistic relationship with the pictographic theater it offers.” Again, it’s important to remember the tongue-in-cheek nature of this entire piece, but at the same time to recognize some of the kernals of truth he drops. I’m somewhat familiar with comics, but my ‘linguistic relationship’ with this ‘pictographic theater’ was frequently strained, rarely sustained. Thanks for the warning, Ware. I just wish I’d taken it more to heart. In this sense, JC is easy to use (as a book is used), but not easy to comprehend/follow. At least not without a lot of work.

I will move on to the third section now, then leave sections 4 and 5 open for comments since they also help reveal some of the themes and difficulties presented in JC.

My only note for Section 3, “Role,” is scribbled at the top of the page. It reads: “awesome.” No, this note is not very deep, nor is it very scholarly. In my defense there’s not a lot of room for notes here, and I dislike the notion of writing in any graphic novel, even if it’s just the introduction. This section blew me away. It was more than just hilarious, profound writing as the importance of a line such as: “As such, the thinking person would have to conclude that, in general, the seeking of of emotional empathy in art is essentially a fool-hardy pursuit, better left to the intellectually weak, or to the ugly, for they have nothing else with which to occupy themselves. Besides, it is unsightly to feel sorry for oneself, and such ‘unfortunate times’ eventually pass, anyway, and if they don’t, then mercifully, for the rest of us at least, suicide is, of course, an option.”

This one line is incredibly loaded, and has implications for our entire reading. Is Ware talking about himself here? We know Jimmy is somewhat based on him, and this line seems to directly reference the lonely, sad, pathetic, passive, ugly, intellectually weak main character in the novel. Jimmy frequently feels sorry for himself, or at least that’s how I’ve read his character, and that is unsightly. At least there’s always suicide. At the same time, though, some of my previous tongue-in-cheek questions come back into play in this section. I don’t think it’s complete farce, but I also don’t think Ware intends us to take it as fact. It falls somewhere in between, and I’m still trying to understand how, exactly, I should be reading this.

For example, Ware writes that emotional empathy is a foolhardy pursuit.  Now, as far as Jimmy Corrigan goes, I agree. I can’t empathize with this character, and after a point I stopped trying and just started enjoying the interesting way he goes about creating a comic narrative. But I can’t say this is the case for 99% of the other fiction I’ve read. Any good writer knows that if you don’t have a character people can relate to (think empathize with), then you don’t really have a good story. That’s not to call Ware a bad writer, he just fits into the echelon of folks who buck the rules, and somehow make it work anyway. They’re a class all their own. Does he know this? I feel like he must, and that’s what gets us some of the lines in the introduction.

Only after reading a good amount of JC and returning to the introduction could I really see some of the hints and warnings Ware drops both the experienced and inexperienced comic reader about reading his text. This helps make it hilarious, but also seems to reveal some of the aspects Ware was more than aware of (and there’s a pun)  when constructing the book. So, now I leave it to you as my word count just keeps increasing:

Is Section 4 another warning, but this one for non-comics readers? Or is it just another joke? What else does it tell us about our reading?

Oh Section 5, how I loathed you–or how you made me loathe myself? Anybody else notice the sexism (or at the very least gender bias) that comes after question 1. “Are you male or female? (if b [female], you may stop. Put down your booklet. All others continue”?

Or is he getting at something else here? Like perhaps that a female comic fan wouldn’t have any of these issues of self-hatred and distant daddies that apparently all comic fans (or maybe just Ware himself) have? What does the instruction that women not take the test mean?

Picture’s worth a thousand

Many people have discussed the role of Nat Turner as a hero, the biblical references, and other aspects of character and storytelling. You beat me to it, so now I’m left wondering how to talk about a text that doesn’t even (really) talk itself. A strong lack of words, save for the occasional diary entry, place most of the storytelling work on pictures. That’s not to say pictures aren’t capable of such an endeavor, they do so all the time in children’s books. But this is a different monster entirely, and as a text that drives home important themes on slavery, morality, literacy, and human nature, it must work harder than the average children’s book. I felt compelled in particular by the way Baker uses revelation of information to help keep my attention high, despite the lack of words.

As I read, I found I frequently asked myself, “wait, what just happened?” One way Baker weaves his stories–while also helping keep readers focused on the story, despite its lack of words–is through his revelation of information, which often sends the reader back several pages to understand exactly “what just happened.” This technique shows up early on and continues through much of the book, though I noticed it does taper off a bit as the violence gets extreme, since the violence becomes the story. When the story opens we see a lot of people living somewhere. Their dress and setting don’t resemble that of a plantation, but I’ll admit I didn’t notice this at first (11–13). When we see the images on 14 and 15, of horses with guns charging in, an immediate sense of time and place comes into the pages. We’re most likely in Africa during a slave raid. After realizing this, I immediately flip back to the beginning to see what I missed, and notice that some of the hints of time and place are in the drawings’ intricacies, though they still rely on the future pages to help make sense and add to the narrative thread of the story.

Similarly, on the boat a baby is born and juxtaposed by images of sharks (41). An interesting, pictorial use of foreshadowing when we later see the role of both the baby, mother and sharks. When the new mother begins running on the deck, I first interpreted this as a fight or flight response of a scared new mother, trying to protect her child (50). Turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong, as we see definitively when she bits the slaver’s arm (54), allowing her own child to fall into a shark’s jaws where it will forever remain outside the grip of American slave owners.

These images help reveal the power that pictures actually have in graphic novels. Subtle depictions can help confuse the reader before forcing him to return to earlier pages to understand what exactly just transpired in the story. In this way, Baker constantly plays with our expectations and helps reinforce characters’ motivations and actions by forcing us to re-read. In this sense, each picture is worth many thousands of words. And each picture forces us to consider how words shape texts, even graphic novels, and helps show that they may not be as important in storytelling as we previously believed.

On Racism, and harming bugs

I don’t think I was the only one jarred by the scene on page 98 when Vladek shows himself to be quite the racist. I’ve tried figuring out how this fits into the book: is this just another one of Vladek’s less-than-desirable traits? Is it human nature to distrust people different from you (as someone posited on twitter)? Can a lifetime of racism come from one bad experience as a person in a new country? I’ve thought about this a bit, and I think all of the above come into play, but that Art included this in the story as a storytelling device. We’ve discussed the role animals play in Maus, and in Maus II we’ve seen some new animals enter (the American dogs who finish out the Tom and Jerry chain of mouse, cat, dog) as well as the familiar pigs (Poles), Deer (Swedes), and Frogs (French). These animals all relate to each other in different ways (or at least they relate to the mice and cats in different ways), and in some ways they help to mirror the racism we see Vladek exhibit.

There was more than just this instance where it seemed Art was making a point about dehumanizing others, as well as senseless killing in Maus II and I believe as he moved on with the story, he wanted to investigate more of the reasons on how people can do these things to fellow living creatures. I think a good way of understanding why Vladek’s racism was included comes from many of the relationships we’ve seen between the Jews and Poles in Maus and Maus II. The pigs don’t see Jews the same way the cats do in Maus. In fact, some Pigs are more than willing to help hide the mice when things get bad. We can see the same type of dynamic in the car when Francoise says to Vladek, “That’s outrageous! How can you, of all people, be such a racist! You talk about blacks the way the Nazis talked about Jews! (99). But Francoise has it wrong: the connection here isn’t so much between the Nazis and the Jews, but the Poles and the Jews. When people are afraid, they can become wary of others, and an early encounter in New York helped turn Vladek into a racist much the same way many Poles became hateful of Jews because of fear and desperate times. It can be far too easy to blame one’s problems on other people, and this happens to both the pigs and Vladek in Maus.

I think the situation in the car, with Vladek afraid and Francoise and Art offering a safe haven in the form of a ride, helps show the way this dynamic can play out. Some of the poles provided safe havens, others sold the Jews out to the Nazis, who then took that racism to the absolute extreme in Auschwitz and other camps.

Art tackles this concept as well. On page 74 we see him sitting on the porch with Francoise, just one page after the horrible scene in which we get the description of the people unlucky enough to go to the gas chambers, the ones burned alive (73). Francoise says “it’s so peaceful here at night. It’s almost impossible to believe Auschwitz ever happened” and then Art is bitten by a mosquito, “these damn bugs are eating me alive” (74). That’s when he grabs the aerosol spray can and hits the bug mid-flight, leaving two dead bugs on the porch as they go inside.

Here we see Art’s juxtaposition between Vladek’s fear of black people, and the Nazi goal of exterminating all the Jews, including with the use of pesticides. I doubt Vladek would kill a black person as indiscriminately as the Nazis killed Jews or as Art killed bugs, and the same can be said for many of the Poles in the book. Here it seems, Art is trying to drive home the issues of racism, while also showing just how far removed he really is from the holocaust, because it seems he doesn’t even realize the irony of spraying bugs with pesticide because they are pesky, which very much mirrors what the Nazis did to the Jews during the Holocaust.

Art’s racism is more Polish. It is wary and serves to maintain his self-preservation, much the same way the pigs are often depicted in Maus. Contrasted with Art’s indescriminate killing of a mosquito, we see the other face of racism, which has less to do with survival and more to do with blind hatred for pests, much the way the Nazis are depicted in Maus. Of course, killing a mosquito does not make one a racist, but it does provide a little more depth at the issues of othering that come up in Maus, and the different dynamic between the Jews and Poles and the Jews and Germans, especially the Nazis.

Narrators We Have to Believe

Early on in Maus, before the Holocaust story begins, Vladek describes his past before the war. Vladek recalls that “I was at that time, young. And really a nice, handsome boy.” Vladek also describes the effect this has on the opposite sex: “I had a lot of girls what I didn’t even know would run after me…people always told me I looked just like Rudolph Valentino” (13). In a similar instance, when Lucia falls to the ground as Vladek leaves he describes himself as having “strong legs” (20).

One issue I have with these passages is that in some ways, they remind me of unreliable narrators I’ve encountered in fiction. While Vladek is certainly not as delusional about his past and present as, say, Brett Easton Ellis’s Patrick Bateman, or as willfully dishonest as Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects, I still feel a familiar hint that someone isn’t being quite honest–or at the very least is playing up their past a bit. This led me to think about reliable narrators, their role and the importance of honesty in a story like Maus.

One issue that comes to play is the role of two narrators. Maus is a strange combination of memoir and non-fiction told through the comic medium. The memoir is all Art’s, a story about father and son. The non-fiction is the mediated story of Vladek’s survival, told to (and recounted/structured/painted) by Art. One of the only novels I can immediately think of that uses multiple levels of narration to tell a story is House of Leaves and without getting too much into that work, let’s just say it’s a mess when it comes to questions about narrator reliability: none of the novel’s three narrative threads are ever presented as completely factual or without their own holes.

Of course, in a story that recounts the horrors of Holocaust Poland, we must rely on our narrators to tell us the truth. A story with such serious subject matter must be told with a high degree of honesty lest it undermine the importance of its message about past atrocities and man’s ability to dehumanize, target and exterminate other men. Our emotional response relies upon this honesty.

It’s also important to note that while I questioned Vladek’s reliability in those early stages, I never felt those notions return as I read on. I wonder if a result of having a mediated story is that reliability always becomes slightly muddled. Or are we just seeing what Art describes on page 131 when he says “…it’s something that worries me about the book I’m doing about him…In some ways he’s just like the racist caricature of the miserly old Jew.” Perhaps, when it comes to his pre-war past, Vladek really isn’t the most reliable narrator. Does that unreliability vanish when he talks about surviving the war because the events are too traumatic to embellish? It’s pretty clear to me that Art is just trying to create an honest representation of his father, even if the end result will only reinforce some stereotypes. All of this helps reinforce Art’s reliability as a narrator. Still, I sometimes wonder about Vladek’s reliability in those early sections, which has me paying close attention to notions of reliability throughout the text.

So now, I leave it to you: Did anyone else question reliability at any point during the reading? Is it even possible for a memoir/non-fiction text to play with notions of unreliability, or does that immediately place a work in the realm of fiction? Have you seen other examples where mediated re-tellings have hints of unreliability? Or am I seeing something that isn’t there and just being jealous that Vladek was such a ladies’ man in his younger days?

Frame Changes in Watchmen

In his chapter on gutters, McCloud lists the six types of frame shifts: moment-to-moment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, aspect-to-aspect, and non-sequitur.

He then charts them out, showing that by far the most popular in Western comics are the action, subject and scene shifts.

While reading Watchmen I noticed some interesting ways that Moore and Gibbons use frames to create moods and tell the story. I noticed a lot of scene-to-scene cuts, something McCloud says doesn’t get used as much in the West. The thing I found especially interesting about Moore’s use of scene-to-scene framing (I will use specific examples from Chapter 3) is that Moore and Gibbons use scene-to-scene while also employing action-to-action and subject-to-subject in an interesting juxtaposition of images, words and ideas that provides an end result that hits the definition of the extremely rare (in the West) aspect-to-aspect framing McCloud describes.

This blurring creates an interesting effect on both the storytelling and early mood of the novel.

First I would like to dwell a bit on the difference between scene-to-scene and aspect-to-aspect, because I found myself confusing the two at times. McCloud writes that “deductive reasoning is often required in reading comics such as in these scene-to-scene transitions, which transport us across significant distances of time and space” (71). He differentiates these cuts from aspect cuts by defining the latter as transitions that “[bypass] time for the most part and sets a wandering eye on different aspects of a place, idea or mood” (72).

In looking at Chapter 3, especially pages 9–15, when the panels juxtapose Dr. Manhattan’s TV appearance with Daniel and Laurie’s adventure in his apartment and on the streets, I feel like we are seeing pretty clear scene-to-scene transitions  since time is a relevant factor. However, the effect of this juxtaposition actually seems to help create the different aspects of a place, idea and mood as outlined in the aspect-to-aspect definition. So let’s take a closer look at this section.

What the scene-t0-scene transitions do so well in this section is create a certain mood: one that shows the current attitude towards masked adventurers, their nostalgia, and the complexity their modern lives pose. Moore really drives this home with the juxtaposed images of Doc Manhattan and Daniel and Laurie that feature one thread of narration–the one that sticks with Manhattan in the TV studio even as the image changes. For example, the TV host says “…And believe me, we have something really special for you tonight” while Daniel and Laurie find themselves surrounded by thugs in an alleyway (12). Later on the same page, the TV host asks “will you be prepared to enter hostilities” to Doc, but the dialogue appears over Daniel and Laurie as they prepare to fight their way out of a bad situation, like they used to in the old days. Moving to page 14, we see much of the same effect. The TV host has just accused Doc of causing cancer in the people he loves, and much of this dialogue is displayed on Daniel and Laurie’s images: “I’m starting to make you feel uncomfortable” as they begin pummeling the thugs; “because from where I’m standing, it’s starting to look conclusive,” as the fight ends; and finally “but the show’s over,” says a an agent as Daniel and Laurie stand, hurt but victorious in the alleyway.

Here Moore uses juxtaposed images to convey a certain sense of the Watchmen’s place in society. Doctor Manhattan is attacked on TV just as Daniel and Laurie are attacked in the alley. Both are under attack at the same time, just in different places and in different ways. The lines of dialogue “it’s starting to look conclusive” and “but the show’s over” help reveal that the Watchmen’s show is over, even if Daniel and Laurie seem to have danced with their nostalgic past in the alleyway. Daniel and Laurie protect themselves in the streets, but their true days of donning costumes and fighting crimes, we are reminded, are long over. Doc Manhattan, the only still-active adventurer, is so hurt by the attacks that he will leave Earth, helping set the rest of the novel’s events into motion and showing that even America’s god-like protector doesn’t receive positive or warm treatment in society; a truly dark time for heroes.

This section also allows us to get a glimpse of the society the Watchmen live in. Media is as vicious as ever, attacking Doc Manhattan by surprise, blindsiding him with news he hadn’t even heard yet to sell papers and increase viewership. The streets are no safer than when the Watchmen “protected” them, as we see a group of armed thugs attack two citizens–who happened to be two of the wrong people to attack.

These juxtaposed frames essentially tell the same story of a world with no room and no trust for heroes, even if the world is still far from a safe place. Moore and Gibbons use scene-t0-scene transitions here to transport us across space and then back again over and over to drive the point home that nobody is safe. The times are dark. The mood is dark. And our heroes are physically and emotionally attacked despite their wishes (at least in the case of Doc, Laurie and Daniel) to be left alone to work (Doc) or live quiet lives (Daniel and Laurie)

What’s interesting is if we were to take away these juxtapositions, for example by stringing just the Doc Manhattan frames together, we’d see a lot of action-to-action and subject-to-subject cuts, as they still exist within the chapter, they just get broken up by the juxtaposition of Daniel and Laurie. By adding in the scene-t0-scene transitions, Moore can double down on his words, using one narrative thread to tell two stories and incorporating action, subject and the obvious scene cuts. This lets us know that the stakes lie on more than just one hero in this novel, and that the stakes are very real and far-reaching. In so doing, he also  creates a strong sense of place, mood and important ideas that are more generally tied to aspect-to-aspect cuts.

And he does this all in six pages of switch-off imagery. If that’s not careful, attentive writing, I don’t know what is.

So I bring it to you now: Is this the type of effect that can only really be achieved by comics, allowing for a juxtaposition of images with one written narrative thread that links them? What other types of cuts come into play in this, and other chapters, and offer us similarly deep results? Am I way off base here and did you see something else?

Robin’s Role

What is it about Robin that makes so many Batman movies fail? Did anyone see Batman and Robin? For lack of a better description, let’s just say that movie sucked. Robin seems to doom Batman on the screen, at least when it comes to box-office revenue, yet in every Batman comic I’ve seen, Robin plays an important role–and does so without ruining the story or the Dark Knight’s mysterious, tough, dark aura. The fact that DKR features a Robin–and a girl Robin, no less –got me to thinking about Robin’s role in the Batman story because regardless of whether you like the caped crusader’s tights-clad companions or not, they’re a part of the story.

In  DKR–and other post-DKR Batman stories (I’m not so sure about the ones that come before as I’m not nearly as versed), I think Robin helps remind us of the moral ambiguity that permeates the Batman universe.  As we see in the newscasts, Batman is accused of using a child to shield himself from bullets. This helps thrust him further towards the criminal vigilante side of things. Who is this monster who would do such a thing to a child? It also helps shed light on the media, as we the readers know they don’t know the full story about how this Robin joined Batman in his fight. Robin helps make the Dark Knight imperfect: after all, he’s willing to put a teenager in harm’s way, and why? Does he really need the help? Or is he lonely and desperate for companionship? This imperfection–or should I say ambiguity–is a key in Batman stories. Right and wrong, good and evil, are generally presented more as questions than answers, and Batman’s use of Robin helps muddle the lines between absolute truths.

Batman appears to know the risks that accompany Robin–as he hasn’t spoken to Dick in seven years (12), implying a falling out of sorts. He also mentions James, while thinking about his promise not to let” him free” (him=batman, robin?), as he stares at the illuminated Robin costume in an otherwise dark, abandoned bat cave (19). Yet despite his promise, or the dangers that come with being a Robin, it won’t take much convincing to convince him to pick up a new sidekick in DKR.

I also think Robin plays an important role on revealing Batman’s own mortality.

Batman may appear to  live forever in comics, but he’s definitely human. In DKR we see him get banged up, revealing his old age and vulnerability. Despite these bruises and scrapes, it’s usually Robin who reminds us of the real odds.  Robins get kidnapped. Robins get seriously hurt. Robins die. These things happen to Robin even as Batman manages to avoid them.

But when Robin–a Batman-in-training of sorts–gets hurt, we remember that Batman is also mortal. Being the namesake of a very sucessful comic (the 400th Batman comic was released the same year as DKR) franchise, Batman can’t die. This is where Robin comes in. The Dynamic Duo frequently face off against armed thugs and supervillains using nothing but agility, cunning and a belt full of gadgets. They usually come out on top, but sometimes the bullets find a mark and the seemingly immortal duo takes a hard hit–or should I say Robin takes the hit. Batman may be immortal for his namesake, but the “Batman lites” that accompany him on his crusades get harmed, and in so doing, do they remind us that the same fate could await the man in the cape? Or do the serve as a warning against all the would-be Batmans of the world? A warning that may read: Batman may be lucky when it comes to avoiding serious harm, but before you put on your mask and cape and hit the streets of NE DC,  you should think about Robin.

I know this is only the tip of the role-of-Robin iceburg. What are some of your thoughts? In writing this I also can’t help but wonder: despite Batman’s written mortality, can he ever really die? Is being a successful comic character enough to guarantee the type of invulnerability usually tied to Superman? Or is it simply the threat of death (as seen in his injuries and Robin’s death) that help make Batman relatable as a person who can die, but probably never will?